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Boy Scout Files Give Glimpse Into 20 Years of Sex Abuse

Boy Scouts camped near Dixon Lake, Calif., in April. Thousands of pages of documents were released Thursday detailing accusations of abuse by scout leaders between 1965 and 1985.Credit
Mike Blake/Reuters

PORTLAND, Ore. — Details of decades of sexual abuse in the Boy Scouts of America, and what child welfare experts say was a corrosive culture of secrecy that compounded the damage, were cast into full public view for the first time on Thursday with the release of thousands of pages of documents describing abuse accusations across the country.

“The secrets are out,” said Kelly Clark, a lawyer whose firm obtained the files as evidence in an $18.5 million civil judgment against the Scouts in 2010. The legal effort to make the files public, by a group of national and local media outlets, including The New York Times — and represented by another lawyer, Charles F. Hinkle — resulted in an Oregon Supreme Court decision in June ordering full release. Mr. Clark said in a news conference that the database would be sortable by state, year and name.

Officials with the Boy Scouts fought in the courts for years to prevent the release of the documents — more than 15,000 pages detailing accusations of sexual abuse against 1,247 scout leaders between 1965 and 1985, with thousands of victims involved, perhaps many thousands — contending that fear of breached confidentiality could inhibit victims from reporting other instances of abuse.

But even as the court fight proceeded, scouting officials were also restructuring the organization’s system of reporting abuse and promised to look back through other old files not released publicly. If evidence is found of past criminal wrongdoing by scout leaders, they say, it will be presented to law enforcement agencies. Thursday’s release followed several stories in The Los Angeles Times involving a separate cache of files that also revealed failures to protect scouts.

“We definitely fell short; for that we just have to apologize to the victims and the parents and say that we’re profoundly sorry,” Wayne Perry, the president of the Boy Scouts of America, said this week in a telephone interview. “We are sorry for any kid who suffered.”

Child protection experts say that the efforts in recent years by the Boy Scouts to better track, report and train youth leaders, and its humility in admitting failure, are all laudable steps, but that much more is needed by an organization that built its name and reputation on trust.

“It steps in the right direction,” said Christopher Anderson, the executive director of Male Survivor, a nonprofit organization for victims of sexual abuse. “The next step is that the Boy Scouts should provide support and help for all those victims and survivors who have been harmed.”

An effort to look back could be long and tortuous, if the files themselves are a measure. In their often chaotic babble of memos, lists and smudgy, photocopied newspaper clippings, often as not there is a lack of clarity about whether an accused scout leader was exonerated, convicted or neither.

Consider, for example, a letter sent in August 1981 by a father of three scouts in western Colorado and placed in one of the “perversion files,” as they were called, or “ineligible volunteer” folders, as they were officially known. The man wrote in despair to scouting supervisors: a local scout leader, referred to in the letter as Joe, had sexually abused boys in his troop, including the writer’s own sons, and yet was still being allowed to have contact with other scouts.

Joe had been spotted at a big scout gathering called a jamboree, the letter said, wearing a leather name tag like all other scoutmasters. “Your assurances that Joe was out of scouting and would have no further contact with scouting have just become meaningless,” he wrote. “Do you care about my distress over watching Joe insidiously get back?”

Other file entries suggest a guarded, institutional caution from scout leaders who seemed to be protecting the organization or were suffused with the belief — others might call it naïveté — that a man who had admitted wrongdoing with young boys should be given a second chance.

“He recognizes that he has had a problem, and he is personally taking steps to resolve this situation,” a scout executive wrote in a memo in August 1972 about a leader who, a week earlier, had acknowledged “acts of perversion with several troop members.”

Photo

Kelly Clark, a lawyer in Portland, Ore., with some of the 15,000 pages of files detailing accusations against 1,247 scout leaders.Credit
Greg Wahl-Stephens/Associated Press

Identifying a sexual offender in advance, before any damage is done, has never been easy. There is no set profile for serial molesters except for their willingness to use positions of trust and power to manipulate their victims, said a professor of psychiatry who examined the group’s internal files in a report last month for the Boy Scouts of America.

But human nature — in a mostly volunteer institution that millions of Americans have revered — also led again and again to dire results, senior scout officials now say. The file system was started in the 1920s in an effort to keep out inappropriate leaders.

“That was a different time,” said Mr. Perry, the president. “That was a time when people thought — the medical community thought — there was a potential for rehabilitation.”

The files do not suggest that scouting was — or is now — riddled with sexual stalkers. Some internal memos discuss the struggles to be fair when proof was hard to come by or when the accusers would not talk to the authorities or press charges. Mr. Clark, the defense lawyer, said that some innocent men, wrongly accused, could have ended up in a file as well.

Other sections are horrific, like the description of the scoutmaster who, according to a 10-year-old boy’s account given to the police, talked about the virtues of the scouting life even as he slid his hand down the boy’s pants.

Sometimes incriminating information flowed into the file system — then apparently got lost or ignored.

That is apparently what happened with Floyd David Slusher. In 1972, Mr. Slusher, then an assistant scoutmaster in Troop 48 in Boulder, Colo., was fired from his job at a summer camp after a pattern was uncovered of “overt homosexual activity” with underage boys. His name was duly filed as “ineligible” although no criminal charges appear to have been filed.

Five years later, still in the Scouts but now in a different troop, Mr. Slusher was arrested and charged with multiple counts of sexual assault of a child. A Boulder County Sheriff’s Department report, sent to scout headquarters, quoted boys who said Mr. Slusher, later convicted, had threatened to kill them if they revealed what he did with them, telling one scout that he would poison his food.

Parents of scouts, the files say, were sometimes left in the dark. One memo in 1982 discussed the case of a man who had been confronted with accusations by troop members and parents. He had admitted everything, the memo said — “taking liberties” was how it was phrased — and resigned, promising to undergo treatment.

Yet the parents were not told that the man had been on the ineligible list in the early 1970s after previous episodes of abuse. “On the advice of the psychiatrist treating him and his minister, he was allegedly ‘cured,’ ” the memo said. “His service in the intervening period and his conduct appeared to be exemplary. This history was not shared with the parents,” the memo continued, with the word “not,” underlined in the text.

But even some parents who felt betrayed held true. The father who in 1981 was so outraged by Joe the scoutmaster was also deeply saddened that one of his sons had become estranged from the Scouts. The father still held out hope that his son could become an Eagle Scout, the highest achievement in scouting.

“At age 18 it is hard for him to understand that scouting is not at fault,” he wrote, “only misjudgment on the part of individuals.”

Correction: October 20, 2012

An article on Friday about the release of Boy Scouts of America files detailing decades of sexual abuse misstated the role played by a lawyer, Kelly Clark. Mr. Clark won a judgment against the Scouts in an abuse case in which the files were used as evidence; he did not lead the court fight to seek public access to the files. (That was led by another lawyer, Charles F. Hinkle.)

A version of this article appears in print on October 19, 2012, on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Newly Released Boy Scout Files Give Glimpse Into 20 Years of Sexual Abuse. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe